Escobedo Saint John's Bible Lecture: Biblical Hagar in Black and White (VIRTUAL) / October 28, 2020

Escobedo Saint John's Bible Lecture: Biblical Hagar in Black and White (VIRTUAL) / October 28, 2020

The Escobedo Saint John's Bible Lecture Series presents

Biblical Hagar in Black and White

featuring speaker Nyasha Junior, Ph.D., Associate Professor at Temple University

Hagar is known as the wife of Abraham and the mother of Ishmael within Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. While many biblical characters are depicted as White Europeans within Western art and literature, some interpreters have treated Hagar as a Black woman. Drawing on her book Reimagining Hagar: Blackness and Bible (Oxford University Press, 2019), Dr. Junior will share a rich tradition of representations of biblical Hagar and discuss how contemporary notions of race affect how we read scripture.

Nyasha Junior, Ph.D.

About Nyasha Junior, Ph.D.

Nyasha Junior is an associate professor in the Department of Religion at Temple University in Philadelphia. For the 2020-2021 academic year, she is a visiting associate professor of Women’s Studies and African-American Religions at Harvard Divinity School. Dr. Junior writes, teaches, speaks, and frequently tweets on religion, race, gender, and their intersections. She is the author of An Introduction to Womanist Biblical Interpretation (Westminster John Knox Press, 2015) and Reimagining Hagar: Blackness and Bible (Oxford University Press, 2019) and the co-author of Black Samson: The Untold Story of an American Icon (Oxford University Press, 2020). For more information, visit nyashajunior.com, and follow her on Twitter @NyashaJunior.

About the Escobedo Saint John’s Bible Lecture Series
Thanks to a generous gift from former Board of Trustees Chairman Ruben Escobedo, a 1960 graduate of St. Mary’s, and his wife Veronica Salazar Escobedo, the Escobedo Saint John’s Bible Lecture Series was created and allows St. Mary’s University to share the remarkable illuminated pages with members of the St. Mary’s community, and faith communities from across Texas and the nation. Each year, through the Lecture Series, outstanding biblical scholars are invited to campus for a public presentation at St. Mary’s and at Holy Rosary Catholic Church adjacent to the campus. These presentations take advantage of and enhance our interdisciplinary campus and community learning, while connecting our students and community to the Saint John’s Bible currently on campus. They are also inclusive in nature, often reflecting on God’s revelation in dialogue between Catholic Christian scholarship and scripture of other traditions. The Escobedo lectures are often part of a larger program in collaboration with academic departments and student life programs, such as University Ministry and Community Engagement, pairing scholarly presentations of the Bible with other creative, intellectual, and spiritual endeavors.